About a month ago UCG member Doug Whalen asked me if having been through the civil rights movement of the 60’s, was I a little surprised and perhaps dismayed to be going through what seem like the same issues all over again. And I said, “Yes, I was…, at first.”

So much happened to the world and to me in the late 1960’s and early 70’s that I thought that we had made progress that would stick. But since the a new racial consciousness that erupted perhaps with the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August of 2014, and the increasing awareness of deaths of people of color, whether by law enforcement or by a crazed racist, such as Dylan Roof’s murder of the pastor and eight black members of Emmanuel Baptist Church in South Carolina, all of us, black and white, have been faced with a new awareness of racial disparity. And I want to share with you how I am working through it

First of all, the challenge of racial disparity today is pushing me to live with multiple conflicting truths operating at the same time. For example, I’ve said many times from this pulpit that I do not believe in the doctrine of original sin as a curse on all humankind because of one act of disobedience in the Garden of Eden. At the same time, however, I do believe there is inherent in the human condition a tendency to ruin what is beautiful, to lose what is innocent.

If America was a Garden of Eden when European explorers encountered it, then clearly, slavery was our original sin. Lerone Bennett, Jr. in his book Before the Mayflower (1962) records the first ship to exchange money for black African human beings docked in Jamestown in 1619, a year before the Mayflower landed in Plymouth. Bennet says that twenty million Africans were brought to the new world. Millions more died in Africa, or on ships, or on plantations. The entire American economic experience is in some way touched by the sin of slavery. I may not like the doctrine of original sin, but I don’t think any of us can deny that slavery was and is a sin by any definition of the word. File that away for a second.

Secondly, here is how I used to think about race. My high school performed the musical “South Pacific” when I was a junior. It’s the story of a company of American Navy sailors stationed on a Polynesian island during World War II, a story I absorbed from many rehearsals and performances in the orchestra pit. Lieutenant Cable, a proper Connecticut Yankee falls in love with Liat, a beautiful Polynesian girl. The more he thinks about this relationship the more he realizes that she as a person of color, would never be accepted by his family or community back home.

I was quite taken by the song he then sings, “You’ve Got to be taught” which Melvin Lopez will offer for us.

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear.
You’ve got to be taught from year to year.
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear.
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade, you’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late, before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate, you’ve got to be carefully taught!
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

I grew up with this paradigm, the idea that we naturally love one another across all distinctions of race, religion, and other differences and that we had to be “taught to be afraid, of people whose skin is a different shade.”

“South Pacific” had come to Broadway in 1949 and was a tremendous hit. When two Georgia legislators saw it on its southern tour in the 1950’s, they introduced a bill outlawing such entertainment saying that a song that “justified interracial marriage implicitly challenged the American way of life.” That’s the kind of impact “South Pacific” had.

The current error of our current era for me is the thought that if we quit teaching children to be afraid or to hate other children of different shades, racism would die of its own accord. I thought an inoculation of moral education and effective legislation would eliminate racism once and for all, sort of like eradicating polio or smallpox.

With the election of Barak Obama I had hopes that at least at some level we had crossed a previously insurmountable racial divide.

There is a part of this that is true. Michelle Obama recently spoke quite passionately at the City University of New York graduation of what it was like “to wake up in the White House, a house built by slaves, and see my two beautiful black daughters go to school, say good bye to their father, the president of the United States, and see their father, a son of a man from Kenya, who came to America for the same reason as so many others, to find the American dream.”

On the other hand, (which is where the meat of a sermon often begins) on the other hand… the greatest realization for me in this new era of awareness of racial disparity is that the lyric “You’ve got to be taught to be afraid,” may be only half the story. It is also true, that you’ve got to be taught not to hate and fear. Hating those who are different may in fact come far too easily to each generation. We comfortably revert to the safety of our own tribes to define ourselves over and against others.

Look how easily it is to instill school rivalries between UF and FSU, between kids who all went to high school together, and who look as much like each other as two angry groups of people could look. Look at how our Gainesville high schools can easily get riled up against each other. We motivate ourselves to achieve by hating our competition.

Maybe we’ve got to be taught to love each other with each new generation.

Moral progress is seldom a straight upward curve. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But that arc may also be a loop de loop that flips back over itself regularly.

The Rev. William Barber who led the movement for Moral Mondays in North Carolina calls the era in which we are now living the third reconstruction. The first reconstruction took place after the Civil War. It was met by an even more powerful reaction that set in place nearly a hundred years of Jim Crow segregation in America. The second reconstruction was the civil rights movement of the 1960’s which made major changes in racial justice, but which was also accompanied by massive backlash. The current awareness of racial inequity and disparity can be seen as a third reconstruction. It may have been marked by the election of Barak Obama and then characterized again by the renewed backlash of violence, regression, and oppression against black people in America.

We have the gift and challenge to be living in this third reconstruction. Think about it. Slavery existed for over 200 years in America. Legal segregation and Jim Crow oppression of blacks existed for 100 years. The era of legalized civil rights is barely 50 years old. Its triumphs are real, yet in many places they are now slipping away. We have the gift of restoring and reviving those gains and moving forward to another level of human decency and racial equity never seen before.

There are two great dangers to this third reconstruction. First is the overt racism of those easy to spot as haters – the Trump movement, the assault gun advocates, the stand your ground killers, and all those who believe safety lies in prisons and economic oppression. The second danger is closer to home and more difficult to recognize. It is us when we, well-meaning and caring people, do nothing stop the trend that is moving rich and poor, white and black, apart.

I told you I that I don’t believe in the classical doctrine of original sin. Yet there is a line in the common confession of sin that I used to say regularly in church that has started playing again in my head. “Almighty and most merciful God, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have done those things we ought not to have done…” and here’s the line that applies to my heart today. “And we have left undone those things we ought to have done…”

When we do those things we ought not to have done, these are called the sins of commission. They are acts of evil we commit.

And when we don’t do those things we ought to have done, these are called sins of omission. We don’t show up when called to do what is good.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of bad people but the appalling silences of good people.” He echoed Edmund Burke who said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.”

I am pretty comfortable about not having done too many overtly evil things in my life. But I stay awake at times at night reflecting on the good things I never got around to doing. And I wonder what evil exists before me today that I am too morally blind to see.
It is the sin of omission that I worry most about.

How do I counter the offhand racist comment at a party?

How do I address the fact that our school programs for bright kids are great in Alachua County, but the gap between white and black graduation rates, which has a million different causes all related to poverty and racism, is larger than any other county in Florida, and it’s widening. What does my silence do to continue this disparity?

When we send our kids to magnet programs at eastside schools, how do we teach our kids to treat and view the kids in those schools who are zoned there in the first place? How do we support and treat the rest of that school population?

Blacks live with the constant threat of terror in ways that we in white communities don’t begin to understand. How am I complicit in this?

History is full of good people quietly looking the other way when the invisible victims of selfishness and fear were being oppressed.

In the gospel lesson this morning, Matthew 25:1-13, Jesus tells the story of the wise and foolish bridesmaids, the foolish ones who let their lamps go out and fall asleep, and the wise who keep their lamps trimmed and burning. When I was a teenager I wrote in the margin of my bible next to that passage that faith demands long lasting faithfulness. We can’t fall asleep in the long night of injustice.

In the bible’s letter to the Galatians (6:9), Paul says, “Let us not grow weary in doing what is right.”

God knows, it is easy to grow weary. It is easy to feel like there’s nothing more we can do. And it is just at this point, facing the current error of our current era, the idea that we did once fix the race problem once and for all, to grow weary, to give up, to feel that there is no way to ever get through the morass of evil created by our original American sin of slavery – no way to ever be healed and redeemed.

The bible is full of people feeling like they have come to a dead end where there is no hope. And this is clearly where we are called to open ourselves to a deeper and higher power and pray for a new future, a healing beyond our own strength.

In the 8th century before the Common Era the prophet Jeremiah sees the fruits of the people of Israel’s constant injustice, their lack of care for the poor, their ongoing selfishness and s elf-centeredness. The poorest people cry for justice. “The harvest is past,” they say. ”The summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

And Jeremiah cries out, “For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.

“Is there no balm in Gilead?” Jeremiah asks (the medicine that grows in the region of Gilead is renowned for its deep healing power). “Is there no physician there?” (Jeremiah 8:20-22).

And to this question the faithful and resilient, still enslaved, black community of America calls back to us with their ageless Spiritual, singing of hope, answering the question that Jeremiah casts into the air…

“There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole, there is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.
Sometimes I feel discouraged and feel my work’s in vain.
But then the Holy Spirit, revives my soul again,
There is a balm in Gilead to make the sounded whole, there is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.”

Prayer:

We open our hearts you dear God, as a power that comes to us when all seems lost and the road before us seems to be a dead end.
We pray that when the issues that divide us so badly that there seems to be no hope for justice, we may find beyond all that seems impossible, your healing gift, a balm in Gilead.
We open our hearts to you O God, as one who opens our eyes to that which we have been blind, injustice unnoticed, signals and warnings not seen, we pray that we may find a light to make us see where all was confused and unclear.
We open our hearts to you, our source of vision and light, when we need a new healing, a new way of seeing, a new way of living through what so confounds us in this moment, that there may be a healing. May the Holy Spirit revive our souls again… Amen
Let us all stand as we are able and sing:
There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole, there is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin sick soul.
Sometimes I feel discouraged and feel my work’s in vain,
But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again.
There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole, there is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.
Don’t ever feel discouraged, for Jesus is your friend, who if you ask for knowledge will never fail to lend,
There is a balm, in Gilead to make the wounded whole,
there is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.